, 1887-08-14
POETIC PORTLAND.
Wanderings and Musings in
Names Celebrated Old City.

PORTLAND, Me, Aug. l2.-Old Port
land town fairly CLOVIS with a welcome for
him who will contemplate her charms in
a loving, appreciative mood. Poets CONF
from out her warm mother heart, and
many well-remembered writer's have
known her stores of inspiration. What
wealth of history, real romance and
quaint, sweet pictures would she not un
fold to him who shall come to her as dis
ciple and depart as prophet-prophet
even in his own country and time! True,
there was prompting in their day to
Nathaniel Deering and that eccentric soul,
John Neal, to Nathaniel P. Willis, to
Seba Smith, the original Jack Downing,
to Fanny Fern, to Hawthorne who knew
it and its environs in the most receptive
years of his youth, and to Longfellow.
But one longs that
soME GENIAL LOVER OF HIS KIND
shall come and revive and preserve the
fair and sweet, unctuous and sturdy, brave
and heroic, pictures which life and death
and change have here left upon the face
of time. | do not recall a spot where
land and sea, history and romance, age
and newness, so blend in all the requisites
for noble work. Even Longfellow, in his
poems all made after he had left the To-
cality, but with its strong influence ever
upon him, barely limited OF what lay I'M
touched. This whole grand coastline
should glow with romance and echo with
song.
II ANCIENT cAsoo.
And what a ripened age is here Bluff
but good old Sir Ferdinand Gorges gave
Portland-what there was of it was
called Casco then-a genuine court of
record through his nephew, Capt. vii
liam Gorges, precisely $50 years ago.
That very court, you can find in the
musty records here, took care of matters
nearly as ponderously as our courts Of
to-day. But even in those dim days, a
quarter of a thousand years ago, there
was a quaint aristocracy on the one side
of heredity and descent represented by
Gorgcs, and on the other of aspiring am
bitten represented by the restless and not
over fastidious Cleeves, the development
of which in social, moral and govern
tai incidents
IN EVERY A LIGHTS M SHADES,
and in not a few tragedies, reveals an
epoch ripe and rich for the novelist $
noblest labor. Aside from all this, see
the nearly two centuries of life whose
c%oloring the artist, romancer or poet can
find standing out SO startlingly clear in
cheer and brightness, or in fame and
blood. After forty Tour years of exist
ence the town and settlement were raw
aged by the Indians in 1876. In 1890
1.-THE little seaport was given the name of
| Falmouth hr fhn nCnrnInn ppvarpnapf of
Massachusetts, in 1859 the place was de-
stroyed, old Fort Loyal captured, and
nearly all its brave defenders massacred
by the French and Indians; which event,
the histories relate, was not the result of
a mere unorganized Indian raid common
to those troublesome times, but had its
origin at Versailles, was approved by
Louis XIV, and was part OF a grand plan
by the French to make a complete con-
quest of New York and New England,
and forever drive their enemies, the
English, from American shores.
THE REVOLUTION BROUGHT DISSOLUTION
and the British, under Mowett, bonn
barded and burned the place in l775.
Then came rebuilding and prosperity, the
non intercourse policy of 1906, the en-
barge Of 1907, and again the stirring times
of 1912, those days of alarm and dread to
all coastwise folk. when the doughty
British Borer and the daring American
Enterprise fought to the death off this
very bay, and their dead commanders
were brought into the widc.eycd Portland
town and laid side by side in the old east
ern cemetery, where you will now see the
heroes graves, and read with a new in
depreciation hat tenderost of Longfellow s
poems, MY Lost Youth" where he
sings
! remember the sea-hght far away,
How 1t Numbered DER the tide
And the dead captains, as they lay
In their graves, oerloOkl Ing the tranquil bay.
Where they In battle died.
A ROMANTIC REGION.
, If the seaport and sea have left stores
of material for the romancer. truly so has